On September 19, 1967, Hurricane Beulah devastated the borderlands of South Texas and Northern Mexico. Tearing across the flat terrain, flooding the Rio Grande/Bravo delta, causing nearly $240 million in property damage, and affecting thousands of residents on both sides of the border, the hurricane was nothing short of a minor apocalypse. In the half-century since it hammered the Gulf coastline, the storm has become a recurring motif in the border region’s long cultural memory, returning to conversation often by way of old photographs, grainy video footage, archived news articles, and unsettling historical analogies. Here, though, I emphasize figurations besides the visual and traditionally textual: the local soundtracks that the storm produced, the narrative folk ballads, or corridos, that it inspired. What might such post-apocalyptic ballads teach us today, amid the immense and interconnected social and ecological difficulties of the present? Uniting literary study with ethnomusicological inquiry, in this chapter I reflect on examples of such corridos to argue for the border ballad’s capacities to unsettle the colonialities of genre, media, and discipline; to bear witness to local catastrophe; and, ultimately, to guide collective memory in the long shadow of colonial encounter.

Maria Jaschok analyzes the opportunities and challenges faced by Muslim women living as a minority, particularly in contexts where religion is under pressure. The chapter highlights the dynamism exhibited by female imams (ahongs) in China, who have strategically leveraged the pressure on male authority imposed by the Chinese state to carve out a larger role for themselves. The chapter also shows how these women seek to connect with the global Muslim community, or ummah, while relating Islam to their everyday realities.

The quality of rule of law has been anything but static in the Islamic Republic: It has varied from area to area of law and across time, with improvements in some years and regressions in others. Established accounts tend to either discount the dramatic erosion of the rule of law in light of the revolution’s other perceived or real achievements (e.g., in terms of education or the Human Development Index [HDI], for example), or paint an entirely bleak picture with gross human rights violations. Discussions seldom differentiate between different areas of law, or acknowledge fluctuations of the rule of law across time. This chapter reviews some of the key areas covered in the volume such as criminal justice, minority rights, property rights, family law, labor rights, freedom of artistic expression and others, mapping progressions and regressions of the rule of law in these spheres and concludes with reflections on prospects for rule-of-law reform.

In this text, Aquinas discusses the question of whether the powers of the soul are the same as the soul. The text is part of Aquinas’ analysis of Augustine’s doctrine of the image of the Trinity. Like his teacher Albert the Great, he argues that the soul and its powers are distinct, and, like Albert, he holds that the soul’s powers are to be viewed as necessary accidents “flowing” from the soul. But Aquinas goes beyond his teacher in an important respect. He devises a new argument in favor of the distinction theory—an argument that we may call the Category Argument. The argument goes like this. A power must be in the same category as its act. All acts of the soul, like thinking, seeing, etc. are accidents. Hence, the powers of the soul must be accidents too. Aquinas justifies the major premise that a power must be in the same category as its act by appeal to what we might call a Causal Proportionality Principle. According to this principle, a cause must be like its immediate effect, where the cause is a power, and the immediate effect is its operation. The Category Argument proved very influential for the subsequent debate over the relation between the soul and its powers.

The introduction offers a brief overview of dance traditions in Naples, noting the principal venue (Teatro di San Carlo) practitioners (Charles LePicq and Gennaro Magri), and genres: ballet d’action, grottesco, and social forms.

Scholarly understanding of these topics has evolved rapidly over recent decades, yet there is still much we don’t know about the complex ways that climate change interacts with migration decisions. In this final chapter, we discuss a number of emerging issues and future research needs including: gendered dimensions of migration in the context of future climate change, how climate-related migration affects Indigenous populations and cultural heritage, the interplay between climate-related migration and human health, the impacts of climate-related migration on receiving communities, identification of critical thresholds in climate-migration connections, and unforeseeable climate-migration outcomes.

Contrary to previous analyses seeing the Standard Babylonian Gilgameš epic as an affirmation of order, the chapter argues that the epic celebrates wilderness and wildness, even the wildness of the hero, Gilgameš, and that it is here its formative power lies.

This brief epilogue considers the decades after the dissolution of the British Board of Longitude in 1828 and the ways in which its functions were subsumed by and distributed between other bodies, within the Admiralty and beyond.

This chapter examines the implications of mapping Latinx theater history through a singular narrative of race and cultural resistance. Scholars have written the history of Latinx theater as the story of minoritarian struggles for representation against the dominant white gaze since the 1960s. I assess how the narrative of overcoming racial oppression has taken a decidedly romantic form since it tells the story of how Latinx communities move from oppression toward an emancipatory future, and how, in turn, this romance’s linear temporal plot defines Latinidad as brown and as antithetical to whiteness. The “romance of Latinidad,” I argue, has served generations of Latinxs artists to craft an aesthetic and a cultural politics of resistance. However, the story of brown resistance consolidates a post-1960s brown/white racial binary that erases non-brown Latinxs from Latinx theater history. After tracing the generations of artists included in the resistance narrative, the chapter turns to Latinidad’s pre-1960s past and discusses the biography and racial ideologies of Josefina Niggli (1910–83), the Mexican American playwright whose whiteness and folkloric representations of Mexicans trouble the romance of brown resistance. Indeed, the analysis seeks to account for Latinidad’s antiracist possibilities by reckoning with Latinx theater’s collusions with racism.

The chapter analyzes the nature and evolution of the administration of criminal justice in the Islamic Republic of Iran. Although current Iranian law incorporates a range of provisions intended to protect the rights of the accused in criminal prosecutions, in practice these provisions are routinely violated. It is argued that the violations of due process in the Islamic Republic of Iran are the result of several factors. First, the criminal justice system has been configured to deal with political opposition as an existential threat to the state, resulting in frequent executive interference in the judicial process and arbitrary trials in revolutionary courts. Second, the structural subordination of the judiciary to the effective power of the Supreme Leader and specific executive agencies has eroded the rule of law. Third, the ideological imperative to Islamize the judicial system after the 1979 Revolution has led to the adoption of judicial procedures that have given judges very wide discretion in the conduct and outcome of cases, notably in criminal law.

In Ordinary Question 4, of which we have translated a large excerpt, Thomas of Sutton argues that the soul and its powers are distinct. Sutton’s strategy for defending the distinction theory is, roughly, two-pronged. First, Sutton develops his own conception of power and act. Second, he aims to show that Aquinas’ arguments for the distinction theory, in particular the Category Argument, are sound, despite objections to the contrary. Key to Sutton’s own conception of power and act are two ideas. The first is that a power is a kind of possibility. Specifically, a power is a possibility that remains when it is actualized. The second idea is that powers and acts are mutually exclusive kinds of being. No act is a power, and no power is an act. Since the soul is a kind of act according to the Aristotelian view, this entails, for Sutton, that the soul is not its powers. In this text, Sutton also seeks to rebut Henry’s regress argument against Aquinas. He argues that this argument is predicated on a mistaken conception of how necessary accidents or propria relate to their bearers.

This chapter provides an overview of policymaking that is being done at international, regional, and national levels, highlighting some of the key processes and frameworks relevant to climate-related migration and displacement. We discuss the extent to which these policies respond adequately (or not) to the needs and complexity of the challenge. We also describe a range of actors that have been actively engaged in these policymaking processes and the nature of their influence on these processes. We assess the different levels of actors in descending order of scale, starting with an overview of international policy frameworks and processes and then moving through regional and national level processes and approaches. Although we assess each level separately, they should be viewed as a network or web of interconnected actors and processes that influence one another, even as they evolve.

Vanessa Vroon-Najem reviews the growing scholarship on women’s conversion to Islam in the West. Drawing on years of ethnographic fieldwork with Dutch female converts to Islam, she demonstrates how initial conversions often stem from the appeal of classical Islamic reasoning on gender norms. Over time, these women learn to respect core values while making adjustments on secondary matters, enabling them to engage with a wider society that remains skeptical of their newly acquired Muslim identity.